The official blog of the Campaign for the American Reader, an independent initiative to encourage more readers to read more books.

Monday, August 24, 2009

What is Chip Brantley reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Chip Brantley, author of The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot.

His entry begins:

I'd been thinking about reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666 for a while and felt like making it my big summer commitment. But my friend Joel suggested easing into 2666 by starting with some of Bolaño's stories and his shorter (but, at 672 pages, still long) The Savage Detectives. So I read Last Evenings on Earth, which is a sinister and just incredible collection of short stories. I'm not sure how to articulate why I love them. You could break them up and examine them, and I'm not sure you'd be any closer to knowing how and why they work so well.

From there, I moved right into The Savage Detectives, with the goal of finishing it in a week or two. That was...[read on]

The cofounder of Cookthink.com, Chip Brantley is a former food writer for the San Francisco Examiner and features writer for the Albany Times Union. He has contributed to many other publications, including Slate, the Boston Globe, the Oxford American, and Gastronomica.

"With great humor, a love of detail and the kind of curiosity that opens one roomful of questions after another, Brantley leads us through the history of plums, the San Joaquin Valley, fruit breeding and the deep connections between food and love."—Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times